Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

33

Access Form Properties

As you have already seen in the previous two lessons, working with Access form properties is an important part of building forms. The form's properties specify the individual settings for a form. For example, the Record Source property for a form determines which data is bound to a form. Although you have been setting these properties statically through the Property Sheet (for the most part) up until now, these properties can also be set through macros or code, as you will see in this lesson. Form properties play a vital role in every Access form, and this lesson will examine several more commonly used properties.

LESSON SETUP

To begin working with form properties, you must have a form to work with in the database. Every form has the same properties, so it doesn't really matter what kind of form you use (except for Web forms; they are completely different). You can easily create a new form or just use an existing one that is already in a database — it doesn't really matter for the purpose of viewing the form's properties.

THE PROPERTY SHEET

As you've seen in previous lessons, an easy method for working with a form's properties is through the Property Sheet pane. Part of Access since the very beginning, the Property Sheet lists each of the various properties that an object contains, providing a list of item names and values that can be modified by the user. The pane consists of five tabs to help categorize each of the types of properties.

The Property Sheet ...